How I got started
I remember waking up early, far earlier than I was accustomed to on a Saturday morning in college, and walking up to the pier on 125th street in Harlem. My editor at the Columbia Spectator had assigned me a story about the guys who fished the Hudson River there. Simple as that. Go and interview them. See what was up.
It was a clear, crisp fall morning, and dozens of men lined the dock by the time I arrived, their fishing lines canted against the current that swung around the nearby Department of Sanitation Center. They had nicknames for each other: The Governor. The Senator. Caddy. When a fish took your bate, that was called "fishing on credit." If you caught a blue fish, you were "singing the blues."
I asked the Governor if he ate what he caught.
"Hell no," he said. "You eat this shit, you go home, turn off the lights, and you glow."
Herein lay a larger story. Turned out that upriver lay two General Electric plants that had discharged more than one million pounds of PCB-laden chemicals into the Hudson from 1946 to 1977. Due to seepage, the factories were still adding toxins to this day.
The article I ended up writing pissed off a lot of people at GE. It also launched my journalism career. Most importantly, it taught me a lesson that continues to guide me as a writer today: Everyone has a story worth telling. Dig down deep enough, that story almost always intersects with yours and mine.